“So many,” said Sparrowhawk’s voice, low and hasty as if he too had gotten a shock; but when Arren looked at him there was the blunt, bland face of the hearty trader Hawk, showing no concern.
“What’s wrong with those people?”
“Hazia. It soothes and numbs, letting the body be free of the mind. And the mind roams free. But when it returns to the body it needs more hazia… And the craving grows and the life is short, for the stuff is poison. First there is a trembling, and later paralysis, and then death.”
Arren looked at a woman sitting with her back to a sunwarmed wall; she had raised her hand as if to brush away the flies from her face, but the hand made a jerky, circular motion in the air, as if she had quite forgotten about it and it was moved only by the repeated surging of a palsy or shaking in the muscles. The gesture was like an incantation emptied of all intention, a spell without meaning.
Hawk was looking at her too, expressionless. “Come on!” he said.
He led on across the marketplace to an awning-shaded booth. Stripes of sunlight colored green, orange, lemon, crimson, azure, fell across the cloths and shawls and woven belts displayed, and danced multitudinous in the tiny mirrors that bedecked the high, feathered headdress of the woman who sold the stuff. She was big and she chanted in a big voice, “Silks, satins, canvases, furs, felts, woollens, fleecefells of Gont, gauzes of Sowl, silks of Lorbanery! Hey, you Northern men, take off your duffle-coats; don’t you see the sun’s out? How’s this to take home to a girl in far Havnor? Look at it, silk of the South, fine as the mayfly’s wing!” She had flipped open with deft hands a bolt of gauzy silk, pink shot with threads of silver.
“Nay, mistress, we’re not wed to queens,” said Hawk, and the woman’s voice rose to a blare: “So what do you dress your womenfolk in, burlap? sailcloth? Misers that won’t buy a bit of silk for a poor woman freezing in the everlasting Northern snow! How’s this then, a Gontish fleecefell, to help you keep her warm on winter nights!” She flung out over the counterboard a great cream and brown square, woven of the silky hair of the goats of the northeastern isles. The pretended trader put out his hand and felt it, and he smiled.
“Aye, you’re a Gontishman?” said the blaring voice, and the headdress nodding sent a thousand colored dots spinning over the canopy and the cloth.
“This is Andradean work; see? There’s but four warpstrings to the finger’s width. Gont uses six or more. But tell me why you’ve turned from working magic to selling fripperies. When I was here years since, I saw you pulling flames out of men’s ears, and then you made the flames turn into birds and golden bells, and that was a finer trade than this one.”
“It was no trade at all,” the big woman said, and for a moment Arren was aware of her eyes, hard and steady as agates, looking at him and Hawk from out of the glitter and restlessness of her nodding feathers and flashing mirrors.
“It was pretty, that pulling fire out of ears,” said Hawk in a dour but simple-minded tone. “I thought to show it to my nevvy.”
“Well now, look you,” said the woman less harshly, leaning her broad, brown arms and heavy bosom on the counter. “We don’t do those tricks any more. People don’t want ‘em. They’ve seen through ‘em. These mirrors now, I see you remember my mirrors,” and she tossed her head so that the reflected dots of colored light whirled dizzily about them. “Well, you can puzzle a man’s mind with the flashing of the Mirrors and with words and with other tricks I won’t tell you, till he thinks he sees what he don’t see, what isn’t there. Like the flames and golden bells, or the S’t of clothes I used to deck sailormen in, cloth of
In s gold with diamonds like apricots, and off they’d swagger like the King of All the Isles …. But it was tricks, fooleries. You can fool men. They’re like chickens charmed by a snake, by a finger held before ‘em. Men are like chickens. But then in the end they know they’ve been fooled and fuddled and they get angry and lose their pleasure in such things. So I turned to this trade, and maybe all the silks aren’t silks nor all the fleeces Gontish, but all the same they’ll wearthey’ll wearl They’re real and not mere lies and air like the suits of cloth of gold.”